You know what it's like. You've recently entered the exclusive club of top 10 tennis players and then you go and win your first ATP Masters Series title, so you're thinking: "How do I celebrate?" Well, for Spain's Tommy Robredo there was only one thing to do. Not for him a Tim Henman arm pump or Federer grimace.

Seconds after clinching the Hamurg title in May the 24-year-old ripped the sweat-soaked shirt from his back and launched it into the crowd - an action that launched him on to a thousand websites devoted to the unwrapped male torso.

That week in Germany had already seen Robredo's profile take a quantum leap forward as a player and as a 'personality'. He'd agreed to do the player's blog on the tournament's website and his revelations about his weakness for Brazilian models and the fact that he calls a friend from his sports agency his dating coach had brought him legions of new admirers.

In fact, the Hamburg strip, which seems to typify Robredo's flamboyance, was suggested to him by a couple of mates over dinner the night before the straight-sets pounding of Czech journeyman Radek Stepanek. To a degree it was intended as a kind of homage to his Barcelona football heroes - themselves never shy to engage in some celebratory shirt-shedding - who earlier that week had stormed to victory in the Champions League Cup final against Arsenal.

So eager was he to watch the game that he'd begged the ATP tour manager for an early match that day so he could wrap it up and be in front of the TV in time for the kick-off. Robredo has his priorities sorted.

And if the victory celebration says much about Robredo's temperament, so does his choice of the Barcelona football captain, Carlos Puyol, as his favorite player. Like Puyol, Robredo is a tenacious competitor who's prepared to run until his legs drop off.

Both are Catalan and some of that fight-till-you-drop character may be a result of their upbringing in Catalonia with its fierce independence and resistance to becoming fully absorbed into the Spanish state.

Of course, for a clay-court specialist, the Rome defeat was a huge punch in the stomach. Like many Spanish players, Robredo loves the clay and every time he arrives on the surface he has the look of a salmon that's reached its breeding ground.

He first found his feet on clay in 1996 at 14 and the potential he had displayed at Olot earned him a call-up to the Centre d'Alt Rendiment Sant Cugat in Barcelona, a Spanish sports centre for promising young talent. And the win on the clay of Hamburg hoisted him to seventh in the overall world rankings and No.2 in the clay-court list, behind fellow Spaniard Rafael Nadal and ahead of the all-conquering Swiss tennis machine that is Roger Federer.

Clays suits Robredo's all-action style. He can chase and slide for every point, employ his famous floating drop-shots and the ball bounces at a good height for his thunderous top-spin forehands, without a doubt the most effective shot in his repertoire.

It is also a surface on which the ability to serve at 210km/h isn't such an advantage, which is good news for the 180cm, 75kg Robredo, who in a world of tennis redwoods is still something of a sapling.

He has managed to bulk up slightly, putting on about 4kg since 2001, which has given him more power. It is most likely the result of stepping up his gym work, but may also have something to do with his addiction to Haribo candies and ice crem which he admitted to eating by the truckload while winning in Hamburg.

And Robredo has shown enough on the tour to suggest he's learning all the time and can make an impact on just about any surface, with the possible exception of grass. And where some critics see his game as limited, with few outright kill-the-match weapons, others interpret that as a versatility that makes the Spanish young gun adaptable and hard to pin down.

Certainly his peers have no doubt that Robredo is a major threat. When it was suggested to the American top 10 player James Blake that Robredo was little more than a steady player, he countered: "First of all, anybody who perceives Tommy Robredo not to have any weapons, I'd like them to go out there and serve to his forehand, because he can hit that like a weapon and he can use that very effectively. Tommy might not be the biggest hitter but he can hit hard. If you give him any time to play, he has weapons that can beat you."

One possible reason Robredo has been underestimated is simply that his progress has been by those baby steps.

Since winning his first professional tournament in Poland in 2001, he slowly consolidated his position and over the next three years his end-of-season rankings rose steadily, if unspectactularly, from 30 to 21 to 13, before cracking the hallowed top 10 this year.

It's difficult not to compare Robredo with his compatriot Nadal, who is four years younger, turned pro three years later in 2001 and has cut a swath through the rankings to become the acknowledged main rival to the almost peerless Federer.

Nadal has 17 singles titles to Robredo's four and has beaten Robredo in all three of their meetings, including on Robredo's home turf in the final in Barcelona earlier this year. It was a title that Robredo had won in 2004 and understandably hankered for again.

But Robredo is characteristically unfazed by Nadal's meteoric rise and you get the feeling that he sees his own lower trajectory as eventually reaching Nadal. Nadal, Robredo would say, is simply another one of those goals. He might not be the next one, but he's on the list.

Talking about the defeat in Barcelona where he went down 6-4 6-4 6-0, he said: "Nadal is a player I can beat, although it's not going to be easy. In the first two sets I did really well, but I wasn't getting any luck so I changed things and that was a mistake. But in a longer match things might have worked out for me and, of course, I believe I can beat him."

Longer matches are Robredo's forte; battling, frustrating and eventually wearing down opponents. His 2004 finals victory in Barcelona against Gaston Gaudio lasted a vein-pumping three hours and 46 minutes and his five-set beating of three-time winner Gustavo Kuerten en route to the French Open quarterfinal in 2003 was one of the epic battles of recent years.

Before he unleashes his shock of high-octane energy on the court Robredo relaxes with a routine that has not changed for the past few years - getting his racquets re-strung, putting on the grips and preparing his energy drinks.

He then goes to the bathroom with his iPod for 20 minutes to listen to music. Although he's loaded it with about 1000 tracks, including works by Bach, Mozart, Coldplay, Bryan Adams and James Blunt, before a match he pumps himself up with rock from the likes of ZZ Top. Unfortunately for his parents, The Who don't feature and Robredo admits he can't sit through the film of Tommy, although he's carried it around on DVD for three years.

He also keeps his room obsessively tidy, so he knows exactly where everything is. But he admits that it's a bit of a sham since his bathroom looks like a tip and his playing gear lies rotting in a heap on the floor.

There's obviously plenty of fire in the belly of the handsome and fresh-faced Robredo, but most of the storms seem reserved for the tennis court and there are few scandalous rumours surrounding the Spaniard's love life.

In the past he has been linked, almost certainly erroneously, with a model called Vanessa Tamouran and the Croatian-born Australian tennis player Jelena Dokic, who he insisted was "just a friend".

More recently he did have a year-long relationship with the stunning Argentine player Gisela Dulko, but that ended before the Hamburg victory and he was keen to point out in his blog that he was once more a single man as he pursued Brazilian models.

Although he's been spotted in the company of many a pretty girl at tennis functions recently, he's yet to gain the reputation of Marat Safin with his Safinettes.

Robredo confesses that when he's away from the court he loves the idea of escaping to the mountains, or at least a darkened cinema where nobody will recognise him and he can just kick back. But his relentless grind up the world rankings is almost certainly going to make his face increasingly familiar to the tennis public - maybe one day as famous as his childhood heroes Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.

Robredo may appear like the tortoise to Nadal's hare, but we all know how that tale ended. And a clue to how far he can go was given by his compatriot Juan Carlos Ferrero. After losing to Robredo in the US Open back in 2001, Ferrero said: "I think that the key to why he's winning more matches is he's playing with so much more confidence. The fact is, he doesn't have fear against anybody."

back